Cyberpunk 2077, a game long known as one of the most graphically pleasing titles out there, has been pushed to run on an R7 370 with just 1GB of VRAM at a playable frame rate after a set of extreme changes by Budget-Builds Official. The YouTuber started with a benchmark that ran just shy of 30 FPS on default graphics settings, then dug into the game's.ini file to force settings below what the low preset allows in-game.
To get there, the creator cut FOV and effect quality to their absolute minimum, turned off global illumination, distant global illumination and SSAO, and pushed screen space reflections nearly all the way down. Volumetric fog, distant volume fog and distant fog were disabled, shadow settings were stripped back so far that the shadows were virtually nonexistent, and post processing, bloom, motion blur, chromatic aberration, film grain, lens flair, AA and dynamic decals were all switched off.
The most dramatic step came on resolution. Cyberpunk 2077 officially supports no lower than 1024x768, but that was not enough to lift performance. Budget-Builds Official booted the game at 800x600 in windowed mode, swapped between fullscreen and windowed mode, changed the Windows desktop resolution to 640x480, then returned to the game and enabled fullscreen again. With that, the benchmark climbed to 45 FPS, and the game stayed above 30 FPS in most situations.
That still was not a clean victory. In intense fighting, the frame rate dropped back below 30 FPS, a reminder that the game is being asked to do something its minimum requirements do not promise. Cyberpunk 2077 calls for a 6GB GPU or better, and the last NVIDIA GeForce graphics card with 1GB of VRAM was the GTX 750, which launched in 2014.
The result matters because it shows how far the game's engine can be pushed when modders are willing to strip it almost bare. It also answers the practical question the experiment raises: yes, Cyberpunk 2077 can be made to run on hardware with 1GB of VRAM, but only by accepting a version of the game that is far below normal visual standards and still not fully stable under pressure.
